


Strangers With the Same Last Name

by bluebeholder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, College, F/M, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Jessica is Good For Sam, Sam Misses Dean, Sam Winchester at Stanford, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 09:50:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4824362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You learn a lot of things when you go to college. </p>
<p>Sam learns about his real place in the Winchester family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangers With the Same Last Name

**Author's Note:**

> “She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”  
> ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, _Half of a Yellow Sun_

“You’re still a part of this family, got it?” Dean growls, shaking Sam for emphasis.

Sam can already feel the bruises forming on his shoulders where Dean’s gripping him. “Yeah, Dean,” he says, and fights the desire to turn and run.

Dean’s eyes are bright and stark in the white bus station lights. “I mean it, Sammy. Don’t think—just because Dad—you’ve always got me, okay?”

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam repeats, and ducks under Dean’s arms to hug his brother.

Then he’s on a bus and the only sign that he ever had a brother are the marks of Dean’s hands pressed into his shirt. Three weeks later, he’s got a dorm room and classes and the marks are gone.

For a while, he thinks that Dean’s just not communicating with him. Dean was always crap at that anyway. No reason to think he’d send postcards. There’s hunting to be done: vampires to behead and ghosts to burn. One month drifts into another month and suddenly Sam’s been at Stanford for three months and hasn’t heard one word from Dean. Still, he keeps on believing that—if he really needed Dean—Dean would come and find him. 

He calls Dean one night, so drunk that he’s seeing in triples and starting to believe that he can feel the world revolving under him. He gets the answering service and leaves a soppy message. The next morning, Sam sits in the communal shower and forces down the ugly feeling that Dean lied. He’s on a hunt. He’s busy. He didn’t want to call Sam back when Sam was so obviously a mess. 

Life goes on. When summer comes, his friend Brady from his English class invites Sam to come back home with him. It’s a small town. Brady’s parents are lovely and welcome Sam like he’s their son. Suddenly, this is life. Sam doesn’t even think of Dean (except on the Fourth of July when his hands burn with sparks from mis-lit fireworks and he misses his brother fiercely). He and Brady swim in the creek and race each other down long country roads and tell ghost stories out in a cornfield. (Sam’s are better than Brady’s, every time. Brady tells him that he should be a writer. Sam can’t help laughing at the irony of it.) They kiss girls (any girls) and once they kiss each other, just to try it out. None of these trysts go anywhere, so they go back to mowing lawns and reading every book that the little town library has to offer. It’s entirely surreal, but by summer’s end it’s all Sam can do to believe that he ever had a life but this. 

Sophomore year rolls around and with it comes Jess. Sam doesn’t fall in love at first sight. They meet in a biology lecture and bicker over seats. Then she pops up on Sam’s floor in the dorms. She doesn’t like Sam’s choice of television and he doesn’t like her choice of books. Anyway, it is not his fault that his most consistent exposure to T.V. as a child was un-subtitled telenovelas. But they make a study group anyway and strive to understand the weirdness that is biology and suddenly Sam realizes that he’s spent the last three weeks sitting up until midnight in the common room with Jess. They talk and talk and talk. It can go all night (though Brady sometimes intervenes and drags Sam back to their room so no one is upset about tests the next day). He wonders if she’s his girlfriend and decides that, no, she isn’t. They’ve never kissed. 

Jess knows about Dean and the family estrangement. She advises that Sam should call. He tries once. It’s nearly midnight, but if he and Jess are awake then Dean should be. But Dean never picks up. Sam’s hands, he’s ashamed to realize, shake when he puts the phone down. “It’s not going to work,” he says to Jess. She scrunches her nose and doesn’t answer him, only gives him a tight hug.

That summer, he goes home with Jess. Her city is loud and big. Sam’s pretty sure that they hunted a kappa here once, but doesn’t mention that. She fits in here. She laughs and dances and sings over the top of the wailing sirens and endless roar of traffic. It’s hard for Sam, used to quiet motels and empty roads, to match her. He gets a job so he can at least pay her back with gas money. It’s just a job at a local grocery store, but the hours are good and the pay is enough. He takes her out for movies and they eat ice cream sitting in the park. It’s amazing. Jess is amazing. Apparently he missed something along the line because, one day, she just leans over and kisses him. It’s a very good kiss.

Summer is over too soon and they’re back in California. Classes this year are ridiculously hard. There’s barely any time for anything other than study. Sam wants to go to law school (he knows that now) and the classes reflect it. Christmas break is barely a break with all the books he has to read. He’s losing touch with Brady and Jess now that he doesn’t live in the dorms anymore. He can barely stay awake, but when he lays down to sleep his mind’s spinning with all the things he still has to do. Once or twice, he looks at his phone and considers calling Dean—admitting he made a mistake, begging his brother to come get him, running away from Stanford—but he never does it. 

It’s the middle of second semester when Jess walks into his room in the middle of the night. “You don’t have a test tomorrow,” she says, and spins his chair around so that he has to look at her. She’s wearing a bathrobe and a very angry expression. Sam tries not to cower. Jess is actually, he realizes, very tall and kind of scary. 

“The world isn’t going to end if you take one night off from all of this studying, Sam.”

He’s about to protest when Jess lets the front of the bathrobe fall open. Every word dies on his tongue. He thinks he probably looks like he just got shot. She isn’t wearing much underneath. 

Sam has had sex before. This is probably the first time that he can think the words “making love” and not have them fall flat. 

In the end, he survives junior year. Brady invites him and Jess along with a big group of friends on a trip up to Yosemite to kick off the summer. Sam spends the nights lying awake, remembering how to clean a gun and where he’s stashed all the parts in his bag. It’s just in case those noises outside the tent aren’t raccoons or bears. He can’t get rid of those thoughts and they stalk him the rest of the summer, even when they’re back in Brady’s hometown washing cars and having waterfights in the yard.

Senior year all of the paranoia pays off. Bodies start cropping up in San Jose and Sam knows this isn’t a human serial killer. He breaks down, for the first time since sophomore year, and calls Dean. 

But Dean never calls back. Not when Sam’s in a morgue with a fake FBI badge he printed and laminated in the school library. Not when Sam’s exploring a murdered professor’s study and jumping at shadows. Not when Sam breaks into a basement and finds a boiler full of rotting human remains. Not when Sam finally figures out what he’s up against and breaks down crying in the dorms because he has no clue how to kill a jiang-shi. Not when Sam is trying to decide how he’s going to survive this hunt. Not when Sam writes a spell in his own blood on a piece of yellow paper. Not when Sam crawls into the sewers. Not when the jiang-shi finds him and Sam sticks the paper to its forehead. Not when Sam grapples with it and sucks its last breath out of its mouth. 

Dean never calls back.

Sam graduates on time, with honors, and prepares himself for law school. He does his best to forget Dean, to forget his family, to forget everything. He’s not a part of that family. He never was. His brother lied and he knows it and he hates himself a little for ever believing what Dean said. 

So when Dean kicks down that door, Sam’s first instinct is to tell him to get out.

And then Sam realizes that—even if Dean doesn’t think Sam is part of the family—Sam still believes that he was part of it. He wants to be a part of it again. Even if he wanted to, he could never stop being a Winchester. So he packs his stuff and gets in the car and drives away from Jess and Brady and the family he’s built for himself, because in the end Dean’s still his brother. Even if Dean doesn't think the same in return.

No matter what happens, no matter what Dean does, they're still family. They always will be.

**Author's Note:**

> This might be just a shade autobiographical. Worrying about my family forgetting me seems to be my brain's favorite pastime.
> 
> Note on the quote: I LOVE _Half of a Yellow Sun_. It is seriously a phenomenal book. Go and read it. 
> 
> This fic was unbeta'd.


End file.
